Please submit only technical tips that will help other TidBITS readers better use their Macs, iPhones, iPads, and related software and hardware. All product announcements should be sent to releases@tidbits.com.

Tip title*

Your tip*

URL

Enter the URL to a Web page that supports your tip.

Linked text

Enter the name of the page linked above.

Your name*

Your email*

* indicates required fields

To help us avoid automated posts and spam, please enter the words below.

When you submit a tip, you give us permission to use it. Read our terms for more details. All submissions are reviewed before publication.

Our terms: By submitting a tip, you agree to assign TidBITS Publishing Inc., a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual license to reproduce, publish, and distribute your tip in connection with the TidBITS Web site and associated products in any media. You agree that you created the content you submitted, and that you have the right to assign us this license. You give us permission to use your name, but your email address won't be publicly displayed or shared. We review all submissions before publication, and reserve the right to select which submissions we feel are appropriate for our readers and to edit those we publish.

Our terms: We reserve the right to edit or delete any comment, so please post thoughtfully. We use your email address only to send you a one-time verification message confirming that you posted this comment. We also store your address to allow you to verify using other Web browsers in the future. For more info, see our privacy policy.

Find Which Applications Phone Home with VirusBarrier X6

Worried about rogue applications or spyware "phoning home" with your private data? Turn on VirusBarrier's Anti-Spyware feature, and it will alert you to applications that attempt to connect to remote servers. Once you know which apps are phoning home, you can block or allow each individually, and you can even block or allow specific ports for each application, to ensure that your private data stays private.

FunBITS: Why Apple May Win the Gaming Market

Once upon a time, Apple and gaming mixed about as well as orange juice and toothpaste. Sure, there was the occasional breakout Mac exclusive, like the classic Marathon, and the Pippin, Apple’s ill-fated foray into console gaming. As Steve Jobs himself once explained, after returning to Apple, he saw that gaming was frowned upon, as it was believed that it would prevent the Mac from being taken seriously. Despite Jobs’s supposed enthusiasm for gaming, with a lack of a central gaming platform for developers, like
Microsoft’s Direct X, and with every version of Mac OS X sporting an outdated version of the OpenGL graphics API, it was clear that Apple wasn’t all that interested.

But a funny thing has happened in recent years: Apple has become an accidental game company. Two things have driven this: the popularity of iOS and the App Store, and the Mac’s switch to Intel chips, which made porting games from Windows vastly easier.

For decades, Nintendo’s handheld gaming devices had a firm grip on (in?) the hands of children, with the Nintendo DS selling nearly 155 million units since 2004. Impressive, but Apple’s iPod touch, released about three years later, has already sold 100 million units, and that doesn’t include the millions of hand-me-down iPhones given to kids. Nintendo’s DS successor, the 3DS, has sold 34 million units since its 2011 release, a number that Apple may have matched with the iPod touch in that timeframe. And that’s not even counting iPhone, iPad, and iPad mini
sales.

Nintendo is still in the race, but falling back. Don’t believe me? This Halloween, compare the number of Marios against the number of Angry Birds that show up at your door. As Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said in 2010, Apple is the “enemy of the future.” The beauty of devices like the iPod touch is that they don’t just play games — they browse the Web, take pictures, help with homework — the possibilities are endless. Sure, the 3DS can do some of those things, but not terribly well. And while the 3DS has an advantage with controls, graphics, and 3D effects, Apple is closing that gap.

In fact, given some of Apple’s new technologies, the secrecy surrounding them, and other information we’ve obtained, I believe that Apple is about to launch a surprise attack on the entire gaming market. Let’s examine the evidence and propose some possibilities.

Sprite Kit -- A new API available in iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Sprite Kit promises to make 2D game programming a piece of cake for developers. Sprite Kit takes care of the trickiest parts of game development, like movement, physics, and particles.

Even more interesting is how secretive Apple has been about Sprite Kit. Yes, Apple acknowledged its existence at the WWDC 2013 keynote, but it saved the demonstration for the under-wraps, NDA-protected Platforms State of the Union. (If you have a paid Apple Developer account, I highly recommend watching the video of that session.)

I can’t discuss the demonstration itself, but iOS developer Greg Carter was so inspired that he decided to make a game himself. Despite having no game development experience, Sprite Kit enabled him to create a variant of Minesweeper with animations and particles.

While I have yet to see any publicly released games based on Sprite Kit, I have no doubt that they’re on the way. Sprite Kit makes it easier for established developers to clean up their code and drastically lowers the barriers to entry for any Apple developer who’s ever wanted to produce a game. Given that Sprite Kit works with both iOS and Mac, it should be relatively easy to release the same game for both platforms — an attractive financial incentive.

Parallax -- Along with Sprite Kit, another new visual feature in iOS 7 is the parallax effect you see on the Home screen, which gives the illusion of depth. More than a fancy user interface effect or a way to make grandma dizzy, app developers can employ parallax as well. While we have yet to see any games take advantage of it, parallax has been built into the latest version of the Flipboard newsreader, giving a 3D effect to magazine covers.

Given that the gimmick of the Nintendo 3DS has been its parallax-based 3D effects, I’m sure iOS 7’s new capability makes the company nervous. And it should. The genius of Apple’s parallax implementation is that no special hardware is required, unlike the 3DS. In fact, parallax in iOS 7 works great even on my elderly iPad 2.

MFi Controllers -- For gamers, perhaps the most exciting announcement to come out of WWDC was official game controllers for iOS 7 and Mavericks.

One of the biggest drawbacks of iOS gaming is the limitation of touchscreen controls. While this limitation has led to some innovations, physical buttons add precision that opens a world of possibilities. There have been a number of controller solutions introduced for iOS, but they’ve been kludges at best (for an example, see “FunBITS: The Sharknado of Game Controllers,” 23 August 2013).

Controller support in Mac OS X isn’t much better. Unlike Windows, which supports Microsoft’s Xbox 360 controller out of the box, Mac gamepad support is a mishmash of individual app support and hacked drivers. I have to keep both a Xbox 360 and a PS3 controller at my desk, because each works better with different games. MFi controller support could fix that problem.

MFi, short for “Made for iPhone/iPod/iPad,” is Apple’s licensing program for iOS peripherals. Companies pay Apple to be certified and to display an MFi logo, and can guarantee that their products will work with Apple’s devices. In the case of game controllers, Apple provides the API, and any Mac or iOS developer who implements it in their game will support these controllers. At last, there is a standard.

And sure enough, major game developers have wasted no time in bringing MFi controller support to iOS games like Bastion, The Walking Dead, Limbo, and AvP: Evolution. Curiously missing thus far are developers of smaller, independent titles.

Strange, eh? The plot thickens. Here’s a question: where are these controllers? Why weren’t they ready for the introduction of iOS 7 or the new iPhones? Sure, it could be a case of production problems, but I know that Logitech has been working on a MFi game controller since well before WWDC.

Like Sprite Kit, Apple saved the controller demonstration for the Platforms State of the Union. Why would Apple want to keep consumer-facing features like game controllers and demos secret? But that’s not all, the mystery deepens…

Mavericks -- We already know Mavericks will support Sprite Kit and MFi game controllers, and bring overall improved performance, including complete support for OpenGL 4.1.

Unfortunately, Apple still lags behind on the OpenGL standard. The latest version, 4.4, was released 22 July 2013. 4.1 was released three years ago, on 26 July 2010. But that’s still an improvement over 10.8 Mountain Lion, which only supported OpenGL 3.2, released 3 August 2009.

But while Apple needs to play catch-up with OpenGL, I have reason to believe the company is taking Mac gaming much more seriously now. Sources have told me that Apple is working closely with developers to improve gaming performance in OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Macminicolo has seemingly confirmed this. They did some testing and discovered that Mavericks borrows much more system memory for the graphics processor than 10.8 Mountain Lion did. Plus, a major game developer told me privately that Apple was working closely with their company to improve gaming performance under Mavericks.

Interesting, to say the least, and the developer I spoke with seemed as surprised as I was. But what better time to focus on 3D graphics on the Mac?

Traditionally, high-end 3D graphics processors have been monsters when it comes to size, power consumption, and associated noise, which doesn’t fit Apple’s current design philosophy at all. Lower-end Macs often relied on weak integrated graphics processors, with just enough power to help accelerate the main Mac user interface.

Apple is almost certainly investigating upgrading the entire MacBook lineup to Retina displays, and driving all those pixels requires tons of graphics power. The sooner Apple starts including more-powerful graphics processors, the sooner economies of scale will bring prices down and help make Retina technology affordable. As a side effect, I think Macs will start shipping with beefier graphics capabilities — Intel Iris Graphics is a nod in that direction — before Retina displays appear. And if the graphics processing power is there, why not leverage it for games as well?

An October Surprise? -- So we have Apple working on all kinds of gaming-friendly software and hardware technologies, but downplaying them as much as possible. That aroused my suspicions. The seemingly obvious answer was that Apple wanted to save this stuff to show it off at the next iPad event, rumored to be coming this month.

But then something odd happened. Last month, independent game company Valve released a few details of their upcoming hardware effort, nicknamed the Steam Box, which relies on a Linux-based operating system and features a unique controller that replaces the traditional buttons with trackpads. It seems that the Steam Box may be a sort of gaming console that provides access to PC games.

That wasn’t the odd thing (OK, the controller is pretty odd). Rather, it was that I made a blithe remark on Twitter — “You think MS and Sony are crapping their pants about SteamOS, just wait until Apple adds MFi game controller support to the Apple TV.” — and the next thing I know, that tweet was favorited by a Todd Walker. It turns out that Todd works for Logitech… in the gaming division!

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe he just thinks it’s a neat idea, or maybe he knows it’s not happening and was merely having a chuckle at my expense. But it got me thinking. Apple is reportedly working on a revision of the Apple TV’s hardware. Why? The third-generation model performs admirably in 1080p resolution. Despite the old rumors, I see no advantage to Apple in building a full TV set. Sure,
Apple could improve upon the overall TV usage experience, but who would spend big money on that? Where would such a TV be displayed in already cramped Apple Stores? What could Apple do with an integrated set that a set-top box like the Apple TV can’t already do?

But what if Apple were to release an updated Apple TV with an A7 chip, powerful enough to render the gorgeous Infinity Blade III at Retina resolution? The Apple TV already features Bluetooth. Just add extra flash storage, an API that can run iOS games, and a connection to the App Store (or an Apple TV-specific App Store), and you have a powerful, inexpensive game console with a huge library of existing titles.

But the Ouya is plagued with problems. The games stink. “The Ouya’s biggest problem, as we’ve said before,” said ExtremeTech’s James Plafke, “is that there just aren’t enough worthwhile games to play.” The controller stinks. As Marshall Honorof of Tom’s Guide explained, “The device falls apart — almost literally — in actual use, though. The analog sticks lack precision, and the buttons also get stuck. Replacing batteries is a pain, thanks to removable faceplates that aren’t quite as removable as
advertised.” Game performance, the Ouya’s primary job, stinks. “The few 3D games on the Ouya seem to range in performance from mostly good to outright sluggish. The frame rates might be fine one minute, but the next it’s noticeably lagging,” said Ryan Whitwam of Android Police. In short, there’s lots of demand and the dominant product is weak. That’s a prime market for Apple, and everything is in place for Apple to take it over.

Also consider the fact that the next generation of the major game consoles, the Xbox One and the Playstation 4, are set to debut in November 2013. Imagine how much wind Apple could take out of Microsoft’s and Sony’s sales by releasing a month earlier, with a cheap console full of games people already love?

Even if Apple doesn’t add gaming capabilities directly to the Apple TV, they’re already starting to be available, and will be strengthened by MFi controllers. Many games support AirPlay Mirroring well, and with added controller support, an iPad combined with an Apple TV makes for a decent makeshift gaming console.

How much does Apple stand to gain? Ignoring the profits from hardware sales, look at the kind of money floating around in the video game market. Grand Theft Auto V, which is available only on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles, raked in over $1 billion in sales in just three days. Apple’s typical 30 percent cut would run to over $330 million. What company wouldn’t want a slice of that pie?

Just One Snag -- At this point, Apple has just about everything it needs to dominate the gaming market: fast processors, powerful graphics chips, the love of developers, and an enormous user base.

But there’s one factor that could hold the company back: storage. Apple has historically been skimpy on hard drives, and that same attitude has carried over to its mobile devices. I was heartbroken to see that the base model of the iPhone 5s still ships with 16 GB of flash storage.

Granted, Apple would likely pursue a more casual market at first, where the audience wouldn’t demand the ultra-high definition textures and audio that make these games so bloated. So far, iOS games have been relatively small, in part due to the smaller screens and limited storage space of iOS devices. For instance, the new Infinity Blade III weighs in at only 1.49 GB, and the iOS version of Grand Theft Auto III is a svelte 483 MB.

But, if Apple wants to reach the big screen in a big way, the company will need to reduce profit margins slightly and increase the iOS device storage capacities.

Game developers are already feeling the pinch. Perhaps the most ambitious iOS game yet, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a direct iOS port of a game designed for the PC and consoles, and it takes up 1.89 GB. Even at that, I’m sure the developers had to cut many corners.

But it’s amazing to think that you can play a direct console port on a device the size of a pack of cards. Apple has done an amazing job of creating a software and hardware platform that just happens to be nearly perfect for gaming. The only thing holding it back now is storage.

Apple Wins the Game Anyway -- Let’s say I’m wrong about everything. Even so, Apple still wins the gaming race. How? By being the ultimate gaming accessory.

When Grand Theft Auto V was released for the PS3 and Xbox 360, Apple wasn’t left out in the cold. Not only did Rockstar release the game manual on the App Store, but they released a companion app, called iFruit. In Grand Theft Auto V, each character owns a smartphone, and the iFruit is a parody of Apple’s iPhone. The real-life iFruit app lets you customize your in-game cars, train your virtual dog, and check your Lifeinvader account (a Facebook parody) from anywhere. Even when you’re miles from your game console, you’re still connected to the fictional state of Los Santos.

Likewise, Sony is releasing a companion app for the Playstation 4 that will let owners use their iPhone to chat with their friends and even buy games that will automatically download to their home consoles. Valve’s Steam app has offered this capability for a while, which is particularly handy during flash sales. A game you want is 90 percent off for the next hour,
but you’re stuck at work? No problem, just buy it on your iPhone and it will be waiting when you arrive home.

Apple is changing how we play video games in more ways than the company probably ever imagined. Not only do we play games on our Apple devices, but we even interact with games on other platforms. The entrenched gaming companies need to stop seeing Apple as the enemy of the future and start seeing Apple as the enemy of today. With a relatively minor hardware update, Apple could dominate the living room, and even if Apple drags its feet, the entire industry is becoming ever more reliant on the forbidden iFruit.

Automatic turns almost any car into a connected car. By pairing
Automatic’s connected car adapter with iPhone apps on
Automatic’s platform, drivers are able to drive safer and smarter.
TidBITS readers get 20% off all orders at <http://automatic.com/tb>

Comments about FunBITS: Why Apple May Win the Gaming Market(Comments are closed.)

I think Apple could increase storage quite easily - I haven't checked specifically, but I have to assume that flash RAM prices have dropped since the original iOS devices, and yet Apple has never increased the amount of flash RAM or really changed the prices, which leads me to believe that, particularly on the higher-capacity devices, Apple is making a margin they don't want to give up.

I think one avenue that Apple could take is something akin to the Fusion drive, but instead of an SSD and a spinning drive, it'd be an SSD and a Cloud drive (which is really Apple's servers). Also, remember you can currently watch movies that you've bought on iTunes, but they aren't stored on the ATV - they are streamed.

Perhaps Apple could store recently used apps/games on a local ATV drive, but older apps only exist in the cloud and are downloaded only when used again. Of course, with a 30GB game, this won't work if you only have an 8GB drive, so perhaps the cutscenes themselves could be streamed or the game is broken up in 2GB segments that are downloaded into a buffer. This would require more work on the developer side, but it seems that it would solve the issues on the consumer end at least.

I'd argue that space management on iOS is pretty broken, actually. It's really hard to manage, and when you run out of space, you're just stuck until you delete something, which is often not at all easy.

I like Raymond's idea of a virtual disk that combines flash and cloud storage. It would need some intelligent caching and pre-loading, but that's known technology.

I'm typically wary of theories based on the things left unsaid, but I want this one to happen, so I'm going all-in.

One big question: why show off the MFi controllers at all, if the goal was to surprise the industry with a new console?

For storage, a network device doesn't jive with what we know of Apple in my mind. It'd be an almost *required* extra device, and that kills the simplicity of "there is no step 2". If Apple does this, the new AppleTV will maybe go to 16GB, and they'll rely on casual games and re-downloads at the onset.

As much as I like Apple's business practices, they rarely like to solve all the problems at once. Leaving a few problems gives them an easy upgrade path.

There was no danger in announcing MFi controllers in and of themselves. Most people heard the announcement, thought, "Oh, neat, finally!" and were quickly distracted by something else.

What other industry observers haven't seemed to understand is that the controllers are the last thing Apple needs to make big inroads into gaming. All the parts are there. The question is if Apple wants to do it, and I think they do.

As for the Apple TV, I think the App Store / gaming will be restricted to the new hardware. I'm guessing 16 GB of storage (the 2nd and 3rd gens have 8 GB) and an A7 processor. There might be a 32 GB model as well.

I don't expect Apple to hype it up much at first. It may be a "one more thing" slipped in at the end.

Why couldn't the next Apple TV, or Apple TV Pro, have a couple terabytes of storage? I would happily pay a bit more to be able to have my movies, shows, games, right on the device, connected to my TV with an HDMI cable (no lag).

I think the main reason is that spinning disks are relatively power-hungry, hot, and unreliable. Apple is moving everything to solid-state memory, which mainly suffers from being more expensive per gigabyte.

To quite one statement: "Imagine how much wind Apple could take out of Microsoft’s and Sony’s sales by releasing a month earlier, with a cheap console full of games people already love?"

I'll argue none. Partially given that Sony and MS have already completed pre-orders and we are likely to see a large number of consoles ship this holiday season, not to mention sales down the road by non-early adopters. And partially because time wasting games like Angry Birds are fun on the go when you have ten minutes to spare. They are not compelling enough to drive a home console. Unless the Ubisofts, EAs, Rockstars, etc. of the world join the party and develop console quality games for the platform the Apple TV as a game system will not fly. The system needs in-depth game play and there is nothing yet to indicate iOS will ever have such a thing. The best game on iOs are re-worked ports of games that play better on consoles (e.g. Tell Tale's Walking Dead). I'm not filled with hope.

Well, I think if you're interested enough in gaming to order one of the new consoles on launch day, then gaming on the Apple TV won't interest you, and Apple isn't really trying to interest you. But it has a good chance of stealing more casual customers away in the long run. Especially when you consider how fast iOS devices iterate compared to game consoles.

If you don't think Sony and Microsoft are scared of Apple, check out the developer policies on the new consoles. They're giving up considerable control to adopt Apple's App Store approach, something they resisted for years.

I don't think Apple will run games directly on the Apple TV hardware, same as Apple does not want you to load music onto Apple TV and run it from there. Apple TV (with or without display) is a hub. The movies come from iTunes servers, the music comes off your iPhone, the games come off your iPad.

The fact that Apple TV is only a hub is how it becomes so cheap and easy. It has almost no storage. It has an SoC that is a reject from iPad, where only one of the 2 cores is functional, which lowers cost and heat. It is really tiny and light and essentially disposable.

Rather than turn Apple TV back into a $300 box with more power and storage, I think the idea is that you spend your $300 on an Apple TV ($99) and iPod touch ($189) and you load games and so on onto your iPod touch and is them via AirPlay with your Apple TV and HDTV set. Notice that now you have 3x the CPU/GPU power and 3x the storage of Apple TV alone. And your TV is also ready to host your friend's iPad when he stops by.

I've had a hard time believing that Apple would build actual TV sets, rather than simply upgrade the AppleTV unit. I have a 55" LCD tv in my living room; I sure wouldn't run out and replace with a (probably premium-priced) Apple large screen of some kind. But I'd replace the AppleTV unit I have hooked up to that 55" TV in a heartbeat, especially if it had app/gaming support.

I remember The Steve showed a HALO trailer at a MacWorld presentation, just before M$ bought Bungie, so gaming was on Apple's mind then. My guess? As Dave said in "2010" "Something's coming, something wonderful".

Wasn't aware that Bioshock Infinite was 30 gigs. On my 128 gig SSD, I'm already limited to one game at a time, rotated through Steam. I'd have to do some heavy lifting to be able to fit Bioshock by itself into that rotation.

Meanwhile, XCOM is 13 gigs on the Mac, so I really do wonder what got cut to make that 80%+ reduction in filesize on iOS. That said, the game's great, so yeah, I'd be interested (and risking losing a LOT more time to it).